Trio Awards

The annual Trio award competition is jointly sponsored by the PSC, the Population Aging Research Center, and Boettner Center for Pension Retirement Research. The competition promotes high quality and innovative research in demography, economics, and related social and behavioral sciences. Trio awards are funded for one year (or less) in duration and are selected through competitive peer review. A list of funded Trios can be searched by typing in key words or the name of the PI, or sorted by the year the funding began.

Aim: The design of pension and health care policies for the elderly requires that we understand the expenditure decisions of the old. Two fundamental characteristics of the elderly are that their health worsens with age and that it does so at different rate for people in different socio-economic groups (Pijoan-Mas and Rıos-Rull (2015)). The question that we plan to address is how do age and health shape preferences and consumption decisions. Surprisingly, very little work exploring effects of health on consumption Specifically, we aim to estimate the effect of health on the marginal utility of consumption. For this we use a model where the evolution of health is itself endogenous. However, we only need to use the consumption Euler equation to estimate structural parameters. This feature greatly reduces the complications of the process and allows us to be agnostic about how is the actual technology that improves health. We exploit plan to exploit differences in consumption growth by age, education, wealth, and health groups that provide enough variation to allow for identification. We use estimates of health transitions by age, education, and wealth that we can interpret as the outcome of optimal behavior and that provide the variation in the data necessary to produce tight estimates.

Aim: Mental health, and specifically depression and anxiety, is a particularly important subset of non-communicable diseases in sub-Saharan African low-income countries. This project will help understand the determinants and consequences of poor mental heath and depression/anxiety in sub-Saharan African lowincome countries. The knowledge gained as part of this project has the potential to help societies to improve the mental well-being of mature adults in context where the public health system is likely to remain inadequate to provide support for depression/anxiety and poor mental health.

Aim: RC28 Conference is a well-known venue for scholars from various parts of the world to meet and discuss theoretical and policy issues related to social inequality which is of growing concern in many countries. Having sessions particularly related to aging and life course in RC28 conference, we hope to stimulate public conversations on socioeconomic disparities in aging, life course trajectories, and inter-generational wealth transfers and savings from comparative and international perspectives. The conference will provide an important opportunity for scholars and public policymakers to discuss various experiences and challenges each country faces in relation to aging population.

Aim: To enhance the scientific value of the forthcoming 5th round of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP) by collecting data on the non-resident parents of respondents in the MDICP.

Aim: The specific aim of this project is to understand how the widespread adoption of the new generation of anti-depressants known collectively as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors has affected labor market outcomes.

Aim: To test the hypothesis that HIV-negative individuals living in a community of high HIV-AIDS prevalence have a greater risk of contracting the disease if their high-sensitivty C-Reactive Protein is elevated > 3.0mg/L; and to evaluate the overall health of some 1000 persons living in Balaka region in Northern Malawi.

Aim: To develop computer programs to put Framingham Study data into a format that can be read into the demographic programs; to revise the analysis programs to increase the speed with which they process the data; and to develop a mechanized approach to scanning the results and identifying SNPs that appear to be associated with longevity.

Aim: To investigate the effects of early life socioeconomic status, place of birth, and household structure on cause-specific mortality and familial clustering of cause-specific mortality in Finland during the latter half of the Twentieth Century.

Aim: To determine whether or to what extent control beliefs differ by personal attributes; to determine whether or to what extent financial well-being differs by personal attributes; and to determine whether or to what extent control beliefs mediate the relationship between personal attributes and financial well-being.

Aim: The specific aims of this project include: Create the first large-scale complete-sexual-network study with detailed phylogenetic data in sub-Saharan Africa; Use the molecular-genotype data to establish chains of HIV infection; and investigate the impact of sexual network structures on the rate at which recombinant forms of the virus, dual infections as well as superinfections, emerge within a population.

Aim: To test two hypotheses using data from a nationally representative sample of 18,102 American adults (NAAL): 1) health literacy is positively associated with self-rated health for both men and women, net of various covariates; 2) the effect of health literacy on self-rated health increases by age for both men and women.

Aim: To examine how people's perceptions about local rates of infection, about their own or their spouse's HIV status, and their perceived risk of infection affects their behavior with regard to decisions to get tested for HIV, to engage in extramarital affairs, and to use barrier methods of contraception.

Aim: To examine the relationship between physical activity and risk of Alzheimer's and other dementia, between physical activity and change in cognitive function from baseline to follow up, between dose of physical activity and risk of dementia as well as change in cognitive function; and to explore the effectiveness of various types of physical activity on cognitive health

Aim: In the US, most employees offered defined contribution (DC) pension plans are provided a wide variety of investment options to chose from, when allocating their retirement saving portfolios. This study will investigate what happens when workers are offered a new type of investment option, namely, Life Cycle (LC) funds, which have been introduced in the last five years by pension plan sponsors.

Aim: To create the Malawi AIDS Research Database (MARD) to be housed at the College of Medicine (COM) at the University of Malawi, which will include (1) unpublished articles and reports that constitute the bulk of research on AIDS in Malawi; (2) links to published articles that are available without subscription on the Web; and (3) published articles accessible through the PSC Demography library.

Aim: To collect measures of health and time preference among a new sample of adults and elderly in peri-urban Durban, South Africa, with each age-stratum further divided into those who are healthy versus those who are not; to collect longitudinal measures of health and time preference among micro- and small-enterprise owners around Durban (also previously collected 2004); and to analyze relationships between health and the ‘individual discount rate’ and between changes in health and changes in the ‘individual discount rate.’

Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness of financial incentives in promoting weight loss among obese individuals and to use the difference in weight loss measured at 16 weeks to project the long-term cost-effectiveness if weight loss is sustained.

Aim: To advance our understanding of variations in health status among native-born and foreign-born Hispanics, NH-Whites, African-origin populations, and Asian Americans, including sub-populations within these broad race/ethnic groups.

Aim: To assess the variation in literacy skills among older adults, particular the literacy gap between those with high levels of formal educational attainment and those with low levels of educational attainment.

Aim: To document mortality patterns in Bulgaria during 1992-98, providing the first reliable life tables and other mortality measures according to religion and ethnic group; and to analyze mortality differentials between Muslims and non-Muslims, focusing on the principal factors expected to account for lower Muslim mortality.

Aim: To evaluate the effect of attitudinal, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control/structural factors on achieving sustained blood pressure (BP) control in hypertensive elderly patients aged >70 and to examine the impact of functional status/comorbidities as barriers to control.

Aim: To examine empirically the population-level structure of sexual networks and explore the role they may play in fostering the spread of HIV as well as in explaining the discrepancies observed between indicators of sexual behavior and epidemic outcomes.

Aim: To apply existing and develop new models of intergenerational and inter vivos transfers to explain motivations for such transfers in a high HIV prevalance county and to investigate whether transfers differ by households that are and are not affected by AIDS

Aim: To further the public dissemination of primary qualitative data to other researchers by using the Malawi project data to set a standard and by collaboration with ICPSR to promote the development of new software and/or technology to facilitate the process of anonymizing qualitative data.

Aim: To examine interactions among three generations in Guatemala using unusually rich longitudinal data over 35 years that will increase the research productivity of an existing project through added data collection that is not already funded by the existing project.

Aim: To evaluate what Chileans do and do not know about their retirement system after two decades of the new program, and, to the extent that current participants and potential participants prove under- or mis-informed, to learn what aspects of the plan seem particularly difficult to fathom and what might be done to correct the lack of information and/or misinformation.

Aim: This study is designed to (1) extend previous analyses of trends in socioeconomic inequality in all cause and cause-specific mortality by age and sex in the United States, (2) investigate whether these trends have been similar among whites and African Americans, and (3) examine trends in the distribution of various risk factors, such as obesity and smoking, by socioeconomic status. The results of these analyses will help determine whether the documented increase in socioeconomic inequalities in mortality between 1960 and the 1980s has continued into the 1990s. The cause-specific investigations together with the analyses of trends in mortality risk factors by SES will point to areas where public health interventions might be most effective. The results will also provide input into further studies designed to illuminate the processes that link SES to health and mortality.